ENGLISH SUMMARY: The study’s main questions are: How do dealers and importers describe the heroin trade? How are the actors recruited to the various positions in the heroin trade and what is their motivation for being involved in illegal activity? The project’s main purpose is to describe the actors in the heroin trade and the tasks they perform.
The study is based on twenty-six qualitative interviews with heroin dealers and importers. Of these, twenty-four were with offenders serving prison sentences for heroin-related offences, and two were with heroin dealers on “the outside”. There are five females and twenty-one males in the sample. Thirteen informants are Norwegian thirteen belong to other ethnic groups. In addition, five police officers who have followed developments in the heroin trade over time interviewed.
Chapter 2 explains the study’s methodological approach. The main focus in the chapter is on possible knowledge generation as a corollary of the prison interviews. Factors that could have affected what they said are discussed and different interpretative alternatives are presented. The methodological challenges are discussed be addressing the following questions. Why would the prison inmates talk with a researcher? What is the framework of the interviews? How do researcher and interviewee position themselves in relation to each other? In addition, anonymisation and analytical strategies are presented. Finally in this chapter, police interviews are described and assessed as sources of knowledge.
Chapter 3 gives a presentation of the main features in the development of heroin trade (smuggling, distribution, sales), as seen from the police informants’ and heroin importers’ and dealers’ perspective. One surprising finding in this study is that developments of the heroin market are described extremely similarly by the offenders and police. The findings can be summarised like this. There were small quantities of very expensive heroin in circulation in the 1970s. The first dealers were users who travelled to the Netherlands and Denmark themselves to obtain the drug. In addition to the Norwegian pioneers, weight it given to Pakistani and Turkish actors as central smugglers and distributors of heroin. Contact between these smugglers and users were facilitated in different districts and at centrally located restaurants in Oslo.
There was still relatively little heroin through the 1980s. Norwegian dealers now fetched heroin from Thailand. In addition to the established Pakistani and Turkish importers and dealers stress, individual North Africans are emphasised. They smuggled heroin in the body’s cavities. As the 1980s progressed, more specialised smuggling equipment appeared as well. Heroin spreads to other places than Oslo in that, buyers who come from outside buy heroin in Oslo and sell it in other towns. It is considered less hazardous to buy in Oslo than abroad.
In the 1990s, more actors assert themselves in the heroin market. Mentioned in particularly are actors from Algeria, Morocco and the former Yugoslavia (such as Kosovo Albanians). Several of the new actors are organised in hierarchical family structures where money from sales is channelled out of Norway. The price of heroin declines throughout the 1990s. A new system of division is introduced which leads to significantly larger users doses.